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Turkey Attacks Truck Driver

Turkeys are funny birds – not funny ha, ha, necessarily, but definitely funny peculiar, a bit like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, we guess.

For close to 365 days a year, we don’t give them a second thought, and then at Christmas and/or Thanksgiving they’re the focal point of an entire day. And then once all the turkey sandwiches and risottos have been wolfed down, we forget all about them for another year. As we said, peculiar.

Well, in what head doctors would probably term a cry for help, it seems the humble bird is hitting back. Literally. A Canadian truck driver had a violent face-to-face encounter with a wild turkey recently after his truck (carrying timber – in Canada, who would have thought it?) collided with an 11kg beast of a bird.

While Andy Hutcheson was driving along a highway the bird came out of the ditch and decided to take on the truck. Unsurprisingly, the truck won, sending the turkey into the air. But the turkey was not to be deterred, crashing through the windscreen of the truck upon its return to Earth and landing squarely in the cabin.

"It was just kind of sitting there stunned for a bit and then started flailing around and got down around my feet." The driver told CNews, "It's a wonder I didn't lose control and put the truck in the ditch,"

Eventually the turkey passed over into the next life, prompting Hutcheson to tie the whopper onto the back of his truck as a macabre souvenir.

"I actually don't like turkey all that much," he said.

It took four hours to get all of the shattered glass and feathers out of his rig, but Hutcheson says he's not worried about getting behind the wheel again.

The bemused driver commented: “I'd never heard of something like that happening before, but now I have.”